The present invention relates to error detection, and more particularly, this invention relates to error burst detection and amelioration.
Error detection and control is important to any system in which data passes from one point to another. Error detection and control is particularly important in the data storage industries, as users rely on the integrity of the stored data for everything from day to day operation to long term archiving.
In a field or test environment implementing a tape-based data storage system, error bursts, which may include a large number of errors in a given time frame or in a given length of tape, are not easily identified since no permanent errors occur and data continues to transfer across the host/drive interface. Even if individual recovery is only transitory in nature, when it persists over long stretches of tape these error bursts can lead to host, command timeouts and excessive processing times that seriously degrade performance. These bursts are often directional in nature, with reported cases of single wrap processing time in excess of 2 hours.
There is therefore a need for effective and efficient ways of detecting and handling error bursts.